We Buy Magic
by FeanorusRex
Summary: A sign appears in a store window, intriguing a college student who really needs money. (Cover art drawn by me.)


**One time, in Oregon/ Northern California, I was on family vacation, going insane, and out of the corner of my eye I see a window saying "We Buy [SOMETHING],' that my mind read as magic. Who knows what it really said, but that's how I thought of this story.**

 _We Buy Magic_ , says the sign in the store window.

 _We Buy Magic_ , nothing else. No detail, no enquire within, nothing. The storefront that displayed this message was plain, and the window was too heavily tinted to see through.

It could mean stage magic, but Cassandra does not think so. _Magicians wanted,_ it would say. Or, _Do you do magic? Call us!_

By advertising standards it was bad, unlikely to draw a good amount of applicants, but she, Cassandra a college student, had noticed it. She needed money for- for everything. To pay for her tuition, and the tiny hidden expenses that people never thought about until college. Money is a horrible, difficult thing. She has a partial scholarship, and student loans, and a part time job to pay for them, but she cannot work too many hours because she needs to keep up her grades for her scholarship.

Cassandra's roommate makes money as a stripper- or exotic dancer as she calls herself. Melody comes home in the small hours of the morning, washes glitter off her dark skin and leaving a sparkly ring at the bottom of their shower, and sleeps until her afternoon classes. Melody has offered to get Cassandra a job dancing at her club, and if this magic sale thing is a dead end, she may accept.

She could do it as long as it was too dark to see the faces of the men- johns? Partons? Marks? She doesn't know what they would be called- watching her. A year ago even considering becoming a exotic dancer- she will have to get used to using the polite name- would have been unthinkable, but now...she _needs_ money.

Anyway, Cassandra will try this shop first. _We Buy Magic_. Maybe it means Wicca or something like, _We buy magical objects,_ but why not just say that? It is am inconspicuous building, between a second hand furniture store and an overpriced candy store. Cassandra's town is one caught between trashy and a tourist trap, pleasing neither locals nor visitors. As she remembers the window and door is completely darkened. The lettering is unchanged, done in bubble letters. There is no open/closed sign. She pulls on the door and finds it unlocked.

 _We buy magic._ Who is we? Maybe this is a front for the mafia or a human trafficking ring. But she needs money; Cassandra thinks of the numbers on her students loans, larger than numbers have any right to be. And it is day time which reassures her. Crime can't take place in broad daylight. She pulls the door open, finding a room that smells like air conditioning, the cold slightly sweet, sterile smell. Besides the portable unit producing it, the room has a table with two chairs, and carpet so thin that it's hardly there.

A door directly across from her is covered with a billowy curtain. It's pushed aside, a woman steps through, and looks at her suspiciously.

"I'm...I'm here about the ad, the window?" Cassandra points behind her, feeling like she is trespassing.

"Oh yes! You're the first person who we've had come in. Sit down," says the woman. She does not give her name. Cassandra doesn't want to ask and then have to say hers in return. She hesitates to sit down, sitting down feels final, a commitment to whatever this is.

"You are here to sell your magic, right?" The woman has ear piercings going up and down the lobe of one ear, Cassandra notes.

"What does the sign mean- magic like stage magic? I'm not a magician."

"Neither am I, and no, not magic tricks, it means magic- magic. Not not slights, illusions, only what you yourself can offer."

"How much will you pay?" Cassandra is in completely over her head- _what is magic-magic?_ \- but she doesn't want to seem like it.

"Depends on what you've got. Let me get a few things and we'll get started. Sit down," she says again. The chair she points to is a computer chair with wheels, that doesn't match the one across from it. Cassandra sits closest to the door she came in through. She spins it side to side as she waits.

She has always has an insatiable desire for a brush with the supernatural. Anything- a visit from a dead person, lights in a cemetery, prophetic dreams. Even something less scary like a talking sphinx, or even a mute one. Cassandra desperately wants to believe that there is something more to this world, and wants to encounter one herself. She has stayed away from tarot cards and that kind of stuff, believing that is something wants to contact her it will independently.

In nineteen years she has experienced absolutely nothing, but now this… Maybe the woman means magik with a k, the infinitely cooler spelling. She may even now be consorting with an eldritch being behind the curtain, and receiving instructions.

The woman walks out carrying an assortment of candles, not cool ones shaped like spinal columns, but a wildly varying bunch, the one she sets down closest to Cassandra reading, 'Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas,' on its plastic wrapper.

She stops imagining a wraith with glowing eyes. Maybe this does have something to do with drugs. Maybe, 'magic,' is a code name. She begins composing a text to Melody in her head, 'hey about that dancing job, i know i said i wasn't interested but-.' She will need a stage name. Cassandra is fancy- from Troy, but she wouldn't use her real name. Helen of Troy, but is that too long? Wooden horses. War. Death. All unsexy. Trojan Cassandra was a seer. She could be Prophetess, Oracle- no.

"What are all the candles for?" All of them, fifteen or so, are now lit, their collective heat fighting the air conditioning, weakly.

"Just a nice touch," the woman shrugs. "Now, your hand please." She doesn't specify which and Cassandra offers her left. She thinks that if it gets injured or cut off, it will be better if it's the non-dominant one.

"Hmm," her touch feels normal and Cassandra braces herself of any hint of the supernatural, ready to tell it back to those on the ghost forums she follows.

The woman looks Cassandra in the eye and the universe rips apart.

Cassandra cannot describe what she sees, or not exactly what she sees- knows. It is huge, defying the limitations of the word. She experiences the world in its pure essence, without form, and she sees why magic extracted from persons is necessary to sustain it. She cannot breathe. She wants to pour out her entire being until there is nothing left, only this wild infinite, _thing._ She cannot breathe. Herself is unraveling, like a badly done weaving, threads of Cassandra ripping away.

The woman breaks eye contact, and Cassandra is back at the table, looking at 'Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas,' wax now melting over its plastic wrapper. "Very good, how do you feel?" Like a nurse after giving a shot. Cassandra feels like a druggie, having taken her first trip, watched by a seasoned user, or a freshman vomiting into a senior's toilet. This woman is judging her reaction and she hates it.

This woman- how many others like her are collecting magic in the world? Cassandra wants answers, and also wants to leave and never look back. An envelope filled with cash is slid across table towards her. "What is this?" She doesn't feel altered physically. Maybe magic is like blood and can be given repeatedly.

"Your payment," the woman says a number near to Cassandra's student loans. It seems small compared to what she has witnessed. But she came here for money, and so she takes the envelope, feeling the normal paper under her fingers, not making eye contact as she leaves. The money is real, or at least the bank takes it. Cassandra pays her bills in regular increments, and burns the envelope,thinking that this is 'safe,' but not quite knowing why.

A month later, as she goes to her job, she sees that the window has changed. It now reads, in bright, angular lettering: _We Buy Souls, see Mr. G. R. Mortis._

She does not go inside.


End file.
